Ricoh U.S. Chief Pledges Greater Channel Investment

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Ricoh's top U.S. executive has a message for industry observers who think the company has turned its back on the channel: indirect sales are more important to the printing and imaging vendor than ever, even as it touts a direct services workforce that numbers 30,000 worldwide.

"It's extremely important," said Jeffrey Hickling, president and CEO, Ricoh U.S., in an interview with CRN Thursday. "Even though we have a strong Ricoh-owned operation, the dealer channel is incredibly important to Ricoh and to me personally because in what we'd call the midmarket and the commercial accounts, a direct coverage model alone can be prohibitively expensive."

Added Hickling: "While a much larger share of our revenue comes from direct, we increased our investment in dealer support 50 percent in 2010."

Hickling acknowledged criticism that Ricoh has, in the past few years, been de-emphasizing indirect channel sales.

Looking at this idea at moving beyond managed print services and leading to MDS, managed document services, can you articulate what you see as the main difference between a lot of the managed print services offerings and MDS? Is it the BPO element?

In my view, managed print services has literally been about looking at a print coming off one device and deciding whether that should be on a desktop printer, a multifunctional printer, a networked device, and in and of itself, that's important. But fundamentally, we're as concerned about non-paper images as we are about the output from a printer. In the future, it's about helping [customers] manage electronic information. Our heritage is the multifunctional printer, but we're much more about managing document workflow, which goes beyond was MPS was, in my view.

Next: Ricoh's Vendor-Agnostic Device Management

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